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Gender Conference : Recaptured

I really had a lot of fun yesterday at Engendering Community: 2nd Annual TransAction Gender Conference. It was a pretty positive experience as are most Utah Pride Center and TransAction events.

I attended Nathan Goodman’s State Violence presentation where Nathan led the discussion of transphobia driven police brutality and prison harassment. The objective was to define new ways in which we can improve our current system.

I like the idea of a community police watch, in which the community holds police accountable for their actions by reporting misconduct by eye-witness accounts with photos or video. I wouldn’t imagine the logistics of such a thing would be too difficult with the advent of mobile video streaming and cloud-based data storage. It’s the resources that would allow us to track or find this police misconduct that could prove difficult. Either way, I’m in support of such a measure.

I believe it was J.D. Gill, a psychologist from the University of Utah who made a very interesting comment during the TransFocus presentation, “transgenderism is more common than down syndrome.” This statement amazed me and led me to investigate the numbers a little more just to confirm.

Not surprisingly I didn’t find any medical journals detailing this, but a couple quick searches on Google sufficed in my lazy mind. According to studies, one out of every five-hundred newborns is transgender (0.20%), and one out of every seven-hundred and forty newborns has down syndrome (0.14%).

In conclusion, I believe the overall theme of the Gender Conference was Awareness and Education. Ignorance is most basically defined as unknowledgeable or uneducated, so to be a resource for the community when it comes to trans awareness is priority one.

I even picked me up a “Nobody Knows I’m a Transsexual” bumper sticker for the Jag, and I will present it proudly to help spread transgender and transsexual awareness.